Tiller the Killer's Killer and Pottawatomie John Brown
By now, you have heard the news that "one of the nation's few providers [sic] of late-term abortions... was shot and killed today in a church [!] where he was serving as an usher" — A Mass-Murderer Murdered. Pro-life pundits and bloggers offered their pro forma denunciations of the act that ended George Tiller's murderous career, but there will be those more ardent pro-lifers who will draw comparisons with Tiller's killer to the militant abolitionist John Brown, whom many then and now revere as an American hero, if only because both acts were committed in Kansas. To make such a comparison would unfair — to the man who ended Tiller's life.
"Evil as slavery was in practice (especially in its American variety, which broke up marriages, sold off children, and discouraged religious preaching to blacks), it was never remotely as evil as abortion," wrote John Zmirak recently — Abortion and Abolition. But it is more than just a matter of degree.
Brown was a politically-motivated domestic terrorist, whose Pottawatomie Massacre had as its aim "to strike terror in the hearts of the proslavery people," as "the federal government decided to place the volatile issue of slavery into the hands of those settling the new territories." The act itself was carried out in revenge for a non-fatal attack by pro-slavery forces in which "not one abolitionist had dared to fire a gun." At Pottawatomie, five pro-slavery men were hacked to death with broadswords, "splitting open heads and cutting off arms," horrifying deaths eerily similar to those Tiller's victims suffered.
Yesterday in Kansas, one of America's most notorious abortionists was killed, not a group of pro-choicers. There is reason that Tiller was "one of the nation's few providers [sic] of late-term abortions." In fact, Tiller's abortuary was "one of three in the nation where abortions are performed after the 21st week of pregnancy, when the fetus is considered viable" — Suspect jailed in Kansas abortion doctor's killing. Abortionists are often personae non gratae among real doctors, and even among people who make their living off the killing of the unborn, there are few comfortable with the killing of third-trimester babies, whose humanity is impossible to deny, as anyone who has seen a sonogram can attest.
Comments from a reader suggest the act can be seen as "self defense of the innocent against known killers intent on killing again and again and again and again and again." He asks, "Is it illicit to trespass on to private property to rescue a drowning child? Is it murder to to save that same child from a man who is intent on drowning that child, but is not at present committing the act but it is known with virtual certitude will commit the act?"
Unless Brown's victims were not only slave-holders but slave-mass-murderers, an analogy cannot be drawn from Tiller's killer to John Brown, but one can perhaps be drawn to Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg.
"Evil as slavery was in practice (especially in its American variety, which broke up marriages, sold off children, and discouraged religious preaching to blacks), it was never remotely as evil as abortion," wrote John Zmirak recently — Abortion and Abolition. But it is more than just a matter of degree.
Brown was a politically-motivated domestic terrorist, whose Pottawatomie Massacre had as its aim "to strike terror in the hearts of the proslavery people," as "the federal government decided to place the volatile issue of slavery into the hands of those settling the new territories." The act itself was carried out in revenge for a non-fatal attack by pro-slavery forces in which "not one abolitionist had dared to fire a gun." At Pottawatomie, five pro-slavery men were hacked to death with broadswords, "splitting open heads and cutting off arms," horrifying deaths eerily similar to those Tiller's victims suffered.
Yesterday in Kansas, one of America's most notorious abortionists was killed, not a group of pro-choicers. There is reason that Tiller was "one of the nation's few providers [sic] of late-term abortions." In fact, Tiller's abortuary was "one of three in the nation where abortions are performed after the 21st week of pregnancy, when the fetus is considered viable" — Suspect jailed in Kansas abortion doctor's killing. Abortionists are often personae non gratae among real doctors, and even among people who make their living off the killing of the unborn, there are few comfortable with the killing of third-trimester babies, whose humanity is impossible to deny, as anyone who has seen a sonogram can attest.
Comments from a reader suggest the act can be seen as "self defense of the innocent against known killers intent on killing again and again and again and again and again." He asks, "Is it illicit to trespass on to private property to rescue a drowning child? Is it murder to to save that same child from a man who is intent on drowning that child, but is not at present committing the act but it is known with virtual certitude will commit the act?"
Unless Brown's victims were not only slave-holders but slave-mass-murderers, an analogy cannot be drawn from Tiller's killer to John Brown, but one can perhaps be drawn to Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg.
Labels: America the Beautiful, American History, The Culture of Death
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